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Title: The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (Vintage Civil War Library) by Charles Royster ISBN: 0-679-73878-9 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 January, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the greatest books I've ever read!
Comment: This is a brilliantly labyrinthine disquisition on the American Civil War. Royster's premise is the examination of the wars' scale of destruction, and the surprising extent of its violence, developed out of biographical sketches of Sherman and Jackson, who Royster believes best personify the Union and the Confederacy. Further, Royster sees the devastation of the Civil War as incipient in the antebellum period. The Destructive War is interpretive as well as critical, literary as well as historical, dealing as much with the idea of war as the facts themselves. Indeed, the author terms his work " a long essay."
Royster depicts the Civil War as-primarily-aggresive, anomalous, vicarious, and as the title suggests, destructive. The Confederacy sought aggressive war to achieve quick legitimacy, its viability depending on the ability not only to wage war, but also to take that war north of the Potomac, make the Yankees feel its effects, and thereby convince them that the costs of prolonged combat would be far too dear. Royster argues that the Union pursued aggresive war, ultimately, to bring progress to the South and demonstrate the superiority of free labor over slave labor, by razing the Confederacy to its foundations and then rebuilding it in the North's own image.
For Royster no one better epitomizes the Confederacy than Thomas Jonathon Jackson, better known by his sobriquet Stonewall, which Royster asserts, reflected a self-created persona. Jackson's Stonewall was an inelegant fusion of plodding resolve, frustrated (if not checked) ambition, and intense piety, smacking of both Calvinism and Arminianism, all funneled into a zealous devotion to duty. His untimely death at Chancellorsville gave birth to the Stonewall myth-patriotic Christian warrior-providing tantalizing 'what if' grist for the counterfactual mill of post hoc Confederate nation building. An advocate of "the tactical offensive in battle" Jackson is certain the Civil War will be "earnest,massed, and lethal."
The essence of the Union, according to Royster, can be found in William Tecumseh Sherman. Alarmed by Confederate strength and resolve, Sherman presciently observed that tactical defensive warfare would be woefully insufficient in what he believed would be a long and costly war. Egged on by newspapers ravenous for victory on the cheap, and deferring to troops already engaged in wanton mayhem, Sherman embraced, then embodied, that which he originally resisted: total war.
Royster includes subsidiary characterizations of the war as drastic, Republican, and vigorous. Drastic war knows no limits in the pursuit of emancipation and abolition. Republican war means "Emergency war powers" and "passionate nationalism" which will create "a new republic, purged of antebellum evils and backwardness." Vigorous war is possible because of the "widespread eagerness to be exonerated of the criminality attached to bloodshed." Auxiliary adjectives such as harsh, bitter, ineluctable and causeless are employed to complete the illustration. In the book's chapter on vicarious war the author asks, "How had the naive notions prevalent at the start given way so readily to killing on a scale supposedly unimaginable?" This single question is the essence of Royster's work.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Good Source of Civil War Information
Comment: The book The Destructive War by Charles Royster, examines the war policies and strategies of the Union and the Confederacy during the civil war. The book talks extensively about Confederate general Jackson and Union General Sherman.
At the beginning of the war the Union did not attack citizens or their property. The Union did not destroy any property of the citizens of the Confederacy because they anticipated winning the war. They realized that if they won the war it would be their responsibility to help the south rebuild. They also thought of the south and the people of the south as Americans despite labeling them traitors. But despite the reluctance on the part of Union Generals to damage citizen's property it eventually became policy. This change in policy came about because, "northern expressions of support for intensified war-making assumed that the Confederate army was an instrument of the Southern populace and that the populace was a legitimate object of attack," (Royster, 81). Women were also subject to attack. Union soldiers attacked women because "in the conventions of the time, women were supposed to use their power to ennoble and civilize-whereas, Southern women, it seemed, were serving what Elizabeth Cady Stanton called "mere pride of race and class." By promoting war against the union and by showing their hatred of Federal soldiers, they imitated Lady Macbeth and "unsexed themselves to prove their scorn of 'the Yankees'." Thus they forfeited their exemption as ladies and noncombatants," (Royster, 87). Confederates did not share this policy. They always were proud that when Lee invaded Pennsylvania in 1863 that he gave an order that soldiers were not to damage citizen's property or plunder it.
The book also talks about General William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman was a southerner who chose to stay in the Union. "He shared (southern) distaste for abolitionist and for Northern politicians who made hostility to slaveholders a political platform. Still, he told Louisianans that secession was treason and that he would not collaborate with it by remaining in the state," (Royster, 90). He hoped to stay out of the war but eventually he joined the Union army. He participated in the battle of Bull Run and blamed the "defeat on the inexperience and panic of the privates," (Royster, 92). He was the senior commander of central and western Kentucky in 1861, despite his desire not to be in charge. He was dismissed of command of the area and rumors spread that he was insane. He eventually led campaigns down the Mississippi River and captured Atlanta. He became famous for his destructive marches through the south.
General Thomas Jonathan Jackson or Stonewall Jackson was a very famous and effective Confederate General. Everyone even Northerners considered Jackson a "genuine general," (Royster, 42). Jackson on many occasions outmatched many Union Generals on the battlefield. He died on the battlefield on May 2, 1863 from friendly fire. Many Confederate Generals including Lee thought that if Jackson had not died that they would have won the war. After the war Jackson came to symbolize many things after the war. He epitomized the courageous and skilled Confederate soldier. He also represented a model "to all the men especially ambitious and aspiring youths, that the self-control and assiduous application he had become a self-made man," (Royster, 162).
The civil war was "an interior struggle in the (Confederacy and Union), an effort to make the newly forming conceptions of nationality inclusive lasting while they were still controversial and nebulous," (Royster, 145). Both sides believed that the best way to validate their idea of the nation is to destroy the other side's army. The Confederacy thought the best way to establish itself as an independent nation would be to deliver to the north a decisive defeat on their soil. General Stonewall Jackson gave the south many victories against the Union and came to be one of the most famous Generals in the war. The Union thought one of the best ways to bring the Confederacy to its knees would be to attack Confederate citizens. General Sherman was famous for his invasion into the south, wrecking havoc on the Confederate citizens.
I had to read this book for my Civil War class. I thought that the book was a valuable source of civil war information. However Royster repeated himself several times in the book. The book also jumped alot from subject to subject. The chapters did not flow into each other; they tended to skip from idea to idea. Despite this it was full of very detailed information.
Rating: 5
Summary: A new way to examine the destructive war
Comment: Royster's "The Destructive War" is one of the most important works of Civil War Scholarship in the 1990's. He blends a sweeping narrative with extensive analysis to explain the development of "total war" and its effects on Americans. What will really engage the reader is not so much Royster's examinations of General William Sherman's actions and those of his men, but rather the ideas of Stonewall Jackson and the calls for the destruction of Northern cities that they elicit from the Confederacy, a nation that was supposedly only wanted to fight a defensive war. While Royster's argument is not without some structural flaws, it makes some very interesting points about Confederate war aims and the willingness of populations and troops of both sides to destroy the cities of their former bretheren. I've read this book twice for graduate level classes and each time a lively discussion has been generated. An excellent book.
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Title: Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust ISBN: 0679781048 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 October, 1997 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Hard Hand of War : Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865 by Mark Grimsley ISBN: 0521599415 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 28 February, 1997 List Price(USD): $22.99 |
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Title: Confederates in the Attic : Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Vintage Departures) by TONY HORWITZ ISBN: 067975833X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 22 February, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Virginia's Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865 by William Blair ISBN: 0195140478 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The War Was You and Me : Civilians in the American Civil War by Joan E. Cashin ISBN: 0691091749 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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